About a year ago I broke my religious commitment to never watching reality TV into pieces, by getting sucked into a little show called The Voice.
If anyone is unaware of how The Voice works: four famous musicians pick twelve singing hopefuls each to coach, things occur until each coach has one singer remaining, and the last four compete in the final. At the centre of the pitch for the show is the fact the initial auditions are "blind", with the coaches having their backs to the singers, supposedly so that they will judge on vocal talent alone.
I started watching the first audition of the last series because my mum and sister had it on. Upon discovering that I liked loads of the people auditioning, and that the coaches were unrestrainedly human nutjobs rather than the robotic typecasts you get judging most reality TV shows, I decided to commit to watching the rest of the series.
Then during the second audition, a decidedly sexy piece of man wearing tight leather trousers and a dark sleeveless hoody appeared on stage, with bleached blond hair and a considerable amount of eyeliner. And he started covering Like A Virgin. And it was objectively fantastic.
His voice was technically excellent while being a basically unique sound. He payed all due homage to the original while making it his own. He blew the audience away, and all four coaches expressed interest in working with him.
This guy was called Vince Kidd. And I basically fell in love with him.
As Vince progressed through the competition, dazzling the onlookers every time, and easily surviving each round, I got more and more excited. Not just because he was someone I would have happily made out with given half a chance, but because he was Someone Like Me doing well in a TV talent show.
I have no idea if Vince is gay or bisexual. It doesn't matter. What matters is how he works his gender, refusing to conform to the accepted standards of what a man is. All his outfits and performances on The Voice were a little bit guyish, a little bit 'gay scene', a little bit feminine, and a little bit of something else entirely.
This mattered to me because everyone has ever won a TV talent show in Britain has fit the mold of either "man" or "woman" like jelly. As do well over 95% of popular mainstream artists today. They are all openly heterosexual, they all wear outfits you could find in the appropriate gendered section of a high street store, all the ones with penises perform in a way which is unnambigously Male, all the ones with vaginas perform in a way which is unambigously Female.
Of course it's absolutely fine for each individual artist to act that way, and I get that the majority of people watching probably fit the same gender roles just as comfortably. But when you are a person who doesn't fit their assigned gender very well, looking at a music industry where nearly all the successful performers are either unambiguously male men or unambiguously female women says: "unusual gender expression is unmarketable. You will always be seen as weird, and are destined for unpopularity. We don't have a place for you."
So Vince Kidd was basically my first great hope that the music industry's relationship with gender was changing or would change, that more than a statistically laughable number of successful performers would be openly gay or, God forbid trans*, and that the world would be more comfortable with even straight-cisgender people being flexible in gender expression.
And how did that pan out, you must be wondering?
So Vince gets to the semi-finals. I'm pretty sure I watched it live, and was probably chewing my fingers the whole time. After a stellar performance, he gets though to the final, and the girl he's competing with (whom I loved but was no Vince) basically admits that the best man won.
I'm out-of-my-mind ecstatic. A week passes.
I don't get to see the final live because I-can't-remember-why (I was probably in Milton Keynes), but I watch it on iPlayer the moment I can.
The way the final works is: each contestant sings twice, people vote, one singer is knocked out, the remaining three sing again, people vote again, winner is announced.
Vince continued, in my opinion, to be the better singer and performer of the four, although we've established how biased I am at this point. But he is the first to be knocked out.
And yeah, it affected me more than it probably should have, and yeah, the fact I fancied him definitely played a part. But I got rather pissed off, and didn't watch the rest of the final.
The way I figured it at the time, the world was telling me that people like Vince weren't marketable after all. That they would only ever get so far. That people would only put up with guys acting feminine or "gay" or vaguely-non-guyish for so long. That even when it seemed most that Someone Like Me was going to succeed, that success would never really be granted.
Looking back now, I'm not so sure. Vince's story was probably the first of his kind, a non-typically-gendered person getting to the final of a reality TV show. So that's probably something People Like Me should be grateful for. But it just didn't feel like enough at the time.
Of course, Vince could still break into the music industry, and has an album coming out this year. You should check it out, not because of smashing the gender binary or anything, but just because he's amazing.
So this has all come up because season two of The Voice UK has begun, and while no-one remotely like Vince has auditioned yet, there are several adorable probably-gay-types who I will inevitably end up rooting for. We shall see how it goes.
If anyone is unaware of how The Voice works: four famous musicians pick twelve singing hopefuls each to coach, things occur until each coach has one singer remaining, and the last four compete in the final. At the centre of the pitch for the show is the fact the initial auditions are "blind", with the coaches having their backs to the singers, supposedly so that they will judge on vocal talent alone.
I started watching the first audition of the last series because my mum and sister had it on. Upon discovering that I liked loads of the people auditioning, and that the coaches were unrestrainedly human nutjobs rather than the robotic typecasts you get judging most reality TV shows, I decided to commit to watching the rest of the series.
Then during the second audition, a decidedly sexy piece of man wearing tight leather trousers and a dark sleeveless hoody appeared on stage, with bleached blond hair and a considerable amount of eyeliner. And he started covering Like A Virgin. And it was objectively fantastic.
His voice was technically excellent while being a basically unique sound. He payed all due homage to the original while making it his own. He blew the audience away, and all four coaches expressed interest in working with him.
This guy was called Vince Kidd. And I basically fell in love with him.
As Vince progressed through the competition, dazzling the onlookers every time, and easily surviving each round, I got more and more excited. Not just because he was someone I would have happily made out with given half a chance, but because he was Someone Like Me doing well in a TV talent show.
I have no idea if Vince is gay or bisexual. It doesn't matter. What matters is how he works his gender, refusing to conform to the accepted standards of what a man is. All his outfits and performances on The Voice were a little bit guyish, a little bit 'gay scene', a little bit feminine, and a little bit of something else entirely.
This mattered to me because everyone has ever won a TV talent show in Britain has fit the mold of either "man" or "woman" like jelly. As do well over 95% of popular mainstream artists today. They are all openly heterosexual, they all wear outfits you could find in the appropriate gendered section of a high street store, all the ones with penises perform in a way which is unnambigously Male, all the ones with vaginas perform in a way which is unambigously Female.
Of course it's absolutely fine for each individual artist to act that way, and I get that the majority of people watching probably fit the same gender roles just as comfortably. But when you are a person who doesn't fit their assigned gender very well, looking at a music industry where nearly all the successful performers are either unambiguously male men or unambiguously female women says: "unusual gender expression is unmarketable. You will always be seen as weird, and are destined for unpopularity. We don't have a place for you."
So Vince Kidd was basically my first great hope that the music industry's relationship with gender was changing or would change, that more than a statistically laughable number of successful performers would be openly gay or, God forbid trans*, and that the world would be more comfortable with even straight-cisgender people being flexible in gender expression.
And how did that pan out, you must be wondering?
So Vince gets to the semi-finals. I'm pretty sure I watched it live, and was probably chewing my fingers the whole time. After a stellar performance, he gets though to the final, and the girl he's competing with (whom I loved but was no Vince) basically admits that the best man won.
I'm out-of-my-mind ecstatic. A week passes.
I don't get to see the final live because I-can't-remember-why (I was probably in Milton Keynes), but I watch it on iPlayer the moment I can.
The way the final works is: each contestant sings twice, people vote, one singer is knocked out, the remaining three sing again, people vote again, winner is announced.
Vince continued, in my opinion, to be the better singer and performer of the four, although we've established how biased I am at this point. But he is the first to be knocked out.
And yeah, it affected me more than it probably should have, and yeah, the fact I fancied him definitely played a part. But I got rather pissed off, and didn't watch the rest of the final.
The way I figured it at the time, the world was telling me that people like Vince weren't marketable after all. That they would only ever get so far. That people would only put up with guys acting feminine or "gay" or vaguely-non-guyish for so long. That even when it seemed most that Someone Like Me was going to succeed, that success would never really be granted.
Looking back now, I'm not so sure. Vince's story was probably the first of his kind, a non-typically-gendered person getting to the final of a reality TV show. So that's probably something People Like Me should be grateful for. But it just didn't feel like enough at the time.
Of course, Vince could still break into the music industry, and has an album coming out this year. You should check it out, not because of smashing the gender binary or anything, but just because he's amazing.
So this has all come up because season two of The Voice UK has begun, and while no-one remotely like Vince has auditioned yet, there are several adorable probably-gay-types who I will inevitably end up rooting for. We shall see how it goes.
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